Ken Wilber is no talking head. Despite his reputation as the 'Einstein of consciousness research,' he's far more down to earth than his crown of glory suggests. Mischief-making, laid back, hip, he's really a fun-loving kind of guy--just like you and me, except that he's a genius.

This contrast surprised me. Like legions of readers around the world, I'd been jolted awake by Wilber's mind. I still remember the moment 10 years ago when I opened No Boundary (a condensed follow-up to his debut classic, The Spectrum of Consciousness). The book had such an impact on me I kept it close at hand for years, re-reading it so many times that I needed rubber bands to hold the covers together. What Wilber had done was synthesize the work of dozens of Western psychologists and Eastern mystics to create a model of human development from infancy to enlightenment that made perfect sense to my skeptical mind. This achievement was more than headwork; it was the fruit of a personal wisdom quest by someone with rare gifts, including, as Tony Schwartz writes in his book What Really Matters: In Search of Wisdom in America(Simon & Schuster, 1996), 'an extraordinarily penetrating, synthetic, and discriminating intellect; a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of psychology, philosophy, mysticism, anthropology, sociology, religion, and even physics; and vast personal experience with the states of consciousness that can be accessed through meditation.' Wilber's 'maps of the route to wisdom cover more of the observable territory,' Schwartz concludes, 'than [those of] any other theoretician.'

As a thinker, Wilber emerged from left field. Born in 1949, the only child of an Air Force officer and a housewife, he spent his boyhood moving to a different town nearly every year. At once an intensely intellectual loner and a party-loving athlete, Wilber holed up in his basement constructing chemistry labs (science was always a passion) when he wasn't drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, making trouble, captaining the football team, or serving as student body president. After graduating from high school in Lincoln, Nebraska, he went off to Duke University with the intention of becoming a doctor but soon changed his mind. 'I knew what science had to offer,' he told Schwartz, 'and it didn't interest me anymore. I wanted knowledge about interior questions.'

Stumbling onto the work of Chinese sage Lao Tzu, Wilber found the beginnings of what he was looking for and began to read voraciously in the mystical literature, as well as the works of Western psychology. Quitting med school, he moved back home, enrolled as a graduate student in biochemistry at the University of Nebraska (largely to placate his parents), got married, entered therapy, and began to practice Zen. The more he learned of these divergent disciplines, however, the more conflicted he became. Science wasn't wrong, he concluded, but 'brutally limited and narrow in scope.' While it was relatively well equipped to deal with the physical side of human life, it had only a sketchy understanding of the mind, and denied the existence of soul and spirit altogether.